"Of all the unimportant things in the world, football is the most important"

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

The Brazilian dinosaur

Brazilian football suffered a terrible humiliation in this World Cup, and with the exit of Scolari it was perhaps time to find some renewal in Brazilian football.
Not so. Brazil has not learned, and seems determined to continue its slide further down the modern and beautiful game, and losing more of its many admirers.
The new national team coach is Dunga, who as captain in 1994 symbolized the modern Brazilian player: hard working, physically strong and with a hard kick, but with little technique and flair. Dunga would have been a great Scottish player in the 1980s.
And Dunga has already coached Brazil: in 2007 he coached them when they won the Copa America, playing a style of football that Brazil is becoming infamous for: destroying the opposition's rhythm with a lot of small fouls and purely going after goals on set-pieces. The exact recipe that has stopped working because Brazil has stopped producing players that could play like Spain or Germany.
Be sure that under Dunga we will see more of the same negative
football from Brazil, who may risk more humiliation in the coming 2015
Copa America, and perhaps even in the World Cup qualifiers.
Could it be a World Cup without Brazil??
Too early to tell...
Nevertheless, Brazil is like a dinosaur that refuses to change and learn from the outside. One would have thought that Germany had given the Brazilians a footballing lesson, but like a stubborn old man, Brazil refuses to learn.